USA Climate Impacts

English
Written By Miranda Massie

Even though the US is one of the countries least jeopardized by the climate crisis, it is still experiencing climate devastation.

Everyone here faces climate harms and risks. But as with the world as a whole, these harms and risks are unevenly distributed. They hit Black, brown, Indigenous, low-income white, and other vulnerable communities earliest and hardest.

Global warming increases the intensity and number of extreme weather events, wildfires, floods, and droughts; it is also causing sea levels to rise. Explore a few examples of the ways we are experiencing these impacts.

WILDFIRES

CALIFORNIA: The 2018 Camp Fire, the deadliest in California history, forced 20,000 survivors to migrate to the nearby city of Chico. Evacuees were significantly older and lower-income than the US population. One quarter of Chico's unhoused population now consists of people who previously had homes in Paradise, a town obliterated by the fire. While it is often perceived that wildfires primarily impact wealthy homeowners, studies show the opposite. Low-income communities-some largely white, as with Paradise-communities of color, and in particular Indigenous communities are disproportionately dispossessed and forced to move by wildfires.

SEA LEVEL RISE

ALASKA: The people of Niugtaq (Newtok), Alaska, primarily Indigenous Yup'ik, are among the first US climate refugees. Melting permafrost and rising seas have led to dramatic coastal erosion, claiming many homes. Residents must relocate their village to preserve what they can of their community and culture. This process has been underway for decades, but due to severe infrastructural and funding shortfalls, only one third of Niugtaq's residents have been able to move. There has been no drinking water in the village since 2019, and no functioning sewage system for longer.

EXTREME HEAT

ARIZONA: On July 20, 2023, Dario Mendoza, a 26-year-old farm worker and the father of two young children, was working in the fields of Yuma, Arizona when he collapsed and later died of heat stroke. Temperatures in Yuma reached 116 degrees that day. Amidst intensifying heat waves, only five states-California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Minnesota-have enacted heat standards for outdoor workers. Although federal regulations mandate that employers provide shade, water, and rest to farmworkers, they do not include specific, enforceable requirements and are usually invoked only when a worker has suffered heat stroke or died.

DROUGHT

KANSAS: Extreme drought is depleting harvests and harming the farm economy across the Midwest. In June 2023, 96% of Kansas was under drought. Farmers faced with dying crops made the painful decision to abandon their fields, relying on crop insurance to barely make ends meet. The drought resulted in the smallest yield of wheat since 1957, leading the US to import grain from Eastern Europe for the first time. With harvests reduced, fewer seasonal workers come through the region; small businesses, their employees, and indeed entire towns suffer.

EXTREME COLD

TEXAS: Arctic warming destabilizes the wind patterns that once kept frigid air in the north, allowing it to intrude south, as it did in February 2021 when Texas experienced a historic freeze. Power was knocked out across the state, and hundreds of Texans died of hypothermia. Kemi Yemi-Ese, a therapist, disability justice advocate, and wheelchair user, was at particular risk because her spinal injury prevents her from regulating her body temperature. With her younger brother's help, she survived six days in the freezing cold without power or heat in her apartment.

SEA LEVEL RISE

FLORIDA: As sea level rise threatens the coastline of Florida, some residents are experiencing climate gentrification. In Miami, property developers who were once eager to build along the waterfront are now turning to safer, higher ground for new developments. The Little Haiti neighborhood, one of the most elevated neighborhoods in the city, is seeing a rapid rise in real estate prices. Those prices are forcing out local community members, largely Haitian and other Caribbean immigrants who have lived in the city for decades.

COMPOUNDED IMPACTS

MARYLAND: Fossil fuels directly harm the health of Baltimore's majority Black population, who suffer the nation's highest air pollution mortality rate, with one third of high school students diagnosed with asthma. Climate impacts present additional, compounded health hazards. Urban heat is a chronic, intensifying threat, and many of the city's distinctive row houses lack air conditioning. Severe storms in May 2019 flooded ​​streets and pumped raw sewage into basements across southwest Baltimore. Mold caused by storm flooding—a recurring and worsening problem in the city-further afflicts the respiratory health of Baltimoreans of all ages.

SEVERE STORMS

PUERTO RICO: In September 2017, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, a US territory, killing dozens of people. Over the next year, 3000 additional US citizens died because roads, power lines, and emergency services were not restored. Two years after Maria destroyed the only hospital on the outlying island of Vieques, the federal government had not approved reconstruction. Thirteen-year-old Jaideliz Moreno Ventura died while being evacuated from Vieques to a hospital, family members hand-ventilating her lungs. After her death received media focus, funding was approved, but construction has not begun.

Miranda Massie
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